The Cambridge Theorem (19 page)

“Yes?”

“Bowles was a bit of an amateur detective. He'd worked out a theory about the Kennedy murder. Quite clever. Recently he'd begun work on Russian spies from Cambridge. You know, the Blunt business. Were there any left, that sort of thing.”

Dearnley said nothing, listening skeptically

“Well, the day before he hanged himself, he'd been down to London, to Somerset House. We don't know why. Cancelled out of a family celebration to do it. Maybe he learned something there which made him do it.”

“You mean found out that one of his ancestors was a spy, and the shame was too much for him?”

“I don't know, but…”

“Derek, really.” Dearnley made a scoffing gesture with his hand.

“Could be just coincidence, but…”

Dearnley's voice was firmer. “Damn right it could be coincidence. It's nothing, Derek. Nothing. Don't let me see any expenses for trips to London, understand?”

“Okay, George.” Smailes felt slightly embarrassed.

“Let's wrap this up.” He swung around in his chair and glared at his Slazenger wall calendar. “Report by Tuesday. I'm gonna need you on the Royston lorry job.”

“The cigarette lorry?”

“Yeah. It's Sikhs, seems. You know what that means.”

“No, what?”

“Think about it. Probably gun-running. You read the papers, don't you? Howell and Swedenbank are beginning to mess their britches about it. Finish this up so we can get you on it, okay?”

“Okay, George,” said Smailes, turning on his heel. As often with his meetings with George Dearnley, he came away feeling both chastened and flattered. He did not see that as he left, Dearnley pulled the Fenwick paperwork again and stared at it pensively, before reaching for his telephone.

There was no one in the detectives' room. The ranks of gray metal desks and green filing cabinets stood silent and empty, like abandoned weaponry. The table just inside the glass panelled door had become a graveyard for dead typewriters and had collected another newly-expired model which was tipped over on its end, its key bars lolling like a parched tongue. Smailes ran his hand over it. There must be only a couple of working models left in the whole department.

Two reports were waiting for him in his in-tray. He examined the first, the post mortem report from the pathologist at Addenbrookes. He saw the familiar signature of Dr. Maurice Jones, who had performed all the post mortems in Cambridge for as long as Smailes could remember. He skipped the preamble where Dr. Jones always spoke about the physical condition of the cadaver and the presence or absence of the major diseases, and jumped to the probable cause and time of death. Jones had time of death between midnight and four a.m. No doubt, thought Smailes. For cause, he had rupture of the spinal column between the first and second vertebrae resulting in massive neurological trauma. A broken neck, in other words. He referred to the contusions on the neck and found them consistent with constriction caused by a thick strap or rope. Or belt, thought Smailes. There were no other marks of injury to the body. He read carefully the blood and stomach contents analysis. A blood alcohol count of 0.06—or about a pint and a half of beer, Smailes calculated. No other unusual chemicals or substances. Dr. Jones' summary was eminently reasonable—that whereas the neck bruising and abrasions suggested the possibility of strangulation, there was no evidence of asphyxiation. Thus the cause of death was the sharp, traumatic injury to the spinal column, which was consonant with hanging. Dr. Jones found it likely that the young man's injury was self-inflicted.

The second report was from Klammer. He was a little surprised the lab had worked so quickly. It probably meant the coroner's people had taken the lifts from Bowles' hands without being asked, and Klammer had been able to run comparisons right away. Smailes was disappointed. As Klammer had predicted, there were nothing but smudges and fragments from the plant pot—Klammer had written Wiped? in the Comments column. The leather belt had a number of poorly-defined prints from different sources—some definitely belonged to Bowles, and Klammer had written Need Eliminators under Comments. From the desk lamp there were again only smudges and fragments—Klammer had no comments. From the file cabinet Klammer had pulled many distinct prints, all identified as belonging to Simon Bowles. And finally, the typewriter keys had yielded good prints of all of Bowles' eight fingers, with fat, full thumb prints from the space bar. So much for someone else typing Bowles' suicide note. It made sense that Bowles would type properly, using all his fingers and thumbs. George was right, it was time to wrap up this case and move on. He looked over the report again and decided no further action was needed. He knew for sure that the belt had been handled by the coroner's officers, and he himself had taken it down and placed it on the desk, without using precautions. It also made sense that the plant pot would seem wiped, as he had manipulated it with his handkerchief. There was no point bothering with eliminators, because there would be no unidentifiable prints, he was convinced. He jotted down these comments and removed his Bowles file from his portfolio, and inserted the report. Time to think Sikhs, he said to himself.

His portfolio felt fat and heavy on his knee, containing all the notes that Alice Wentworth had let him remove that morning. He examined the slim document he had missed yesterday, Bowles'
Kennedy Theorem
. He yawned mightily, and remembered again how little sleep he had had the night before due to Simon Bowles.

An hour and a half later he finished the document with a racing heart. He was almost sure Bowles was right, that Hector Martinez had killed Kennedy, or at least masterminded the murder. Bowles pronounced it the crime of the century, and Smailes was inclined to agree. He also had to agree that it was likely this improbable young man in his Cambridge study had solved a crime that had defeated all other public and private investigations. He felt an involuntary surge of admiration.

As Alice Wentworth had said, her brother's breakthrough appeared to come after the arrival of a number of documents from the States during the time he was in the hospital. Bowles had corresponded with an independent researcher in California, who had sent him a stack of FBI and CIA documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. Many of these apparently dealt with the activities of the Cuban exile community in the months preceding and following the Kennedy assassination. There were even photographs of Oswald taken with some Cubans at one of the paramilitary camps in Louisiana. Then there was a long report by a UN-affiliated Latin America Research Group, examining upheavals in Cuba in the mid-sixties, in particular a damaging rift between the Castro brothers which some analysts had thought might lead to an open power struggle, and even civil war. He had no idea how Bowles had located this document, which was nearly twenty years old. Together the documents seemed to represent to Bowles the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that he had known must be lying around somewhere, and he had latched onto their significance with awesome intellectual speed.

The loops and turns of Bowles' exposition were hard to follow, but his breakthrough had obviously come with the identification of the mysterious Cuban with whom Oswald was seen in the months preceding the shooting. From the photographs he'd received, Bowles tagged him as Hector Martinez, an agent run personally by the Cuban Intelligence chief Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. It appeared Oswald had known Martinez years before in Minsk during his stay there, when Martinez was enrolled in a KGB language school.

The plot to murder Kennedy was apparently an elaborate triple bluff hatched by Martinez as a freelancer, without approval of either of the Castros. Mafia money bankrolled the job, which entailed the murder of Kennedy by three professional assassins including Martinez and the set-up of Oswald for the fall, while pinning the conception on the anti-Castro exiles. Martinez' game was to neutralize both Kennedy and the exiles, the two biggest threats to the survival of the revolution, and to become a hero himself on his return to Cuba. Oswald had been sold a story that he and Martinez would escape together, the blame falling on the lunatic Cuban right-wing that they had infiltrated. Meanwhile, Martinez had conspired with the exiles to arrange for Oswald, a known Marxist, to be taken out trying to escape. Apart from Oswald's unexpected survival of his arrest, the plan worked perfectly. Martinez had counted on the Mafia's code of silence as a failsafe, which kicked in when Ruby, the mob's bagman in Dallas, gunned down Oswald in the police basement. This was the story, Bowles speculated, that Martinez told Raul Castro after his documented flight from Dallas to Havana on the afternoon of the murder.

Simon Bowles claimed that Hector Martinez was still in a Havana jail, his execution stayed only by personal intercession of Raul Castro. The other assassins were not so fortunate; Fidel Castro insisted they each be located and eliminated. Indeed, the Cuban leader had been enraged when he learned of the crazy plot, and hourly expected invasion after Oswald's Marxist background became known. That Raul had not authorized the murder did not excuse him in Fidel's eyes, and a dangerous rift opened up between the two brothers. Only when it became clear that the U.S. Establishment would close ranks behind the “lone nut” theory, and that the Texan who had inherited the White House would not invade, did the division heal. The official investigation suppressed any evidence that might have tied Oswald to the exiles, and likewise the Warren panel dismissed notions that Oswald was an agent of Havana, despite LBJ's private doubts. Luckily for Cuba, the U.S. military leadership soon persuaded Johnson that his main communist threat lay elsewhere, in Southeast Asia, and the danger of reprisals passed. After Raul Castro, retreating to his power base within the Cuban military, was rehabilitated, the threat to Cuba's stability receded. Fidel Castro even met later with Congressional investigators to explain Cuba's innocence in the affair. It would have been folly, he argued, for Cuba to provoke its superpower enemy through such a lunatic act. The Congressmen accepted the sorrowful analysis, and conceded that a traitor's murderous actions had indeed prevented better relations with this troublesome neighbor. It was one minor note in the greater tragedy of that brutal crime.

Derek Smailes thought back over the entire reach of Bowles' Kennedy work, and was thrilled by what it showed. Starting with the application of mathematical rules to known evidence, he had patiently refuted the official version of a deadly accurate lone assassin. He then illuminated each contradiction created by the false premise. Then, with his new knowledge of a key player in the crime, went back and resolved each loose end one by one, so the final analysis shone with an irrefutable logic. The detective could not imagine that Bowles had been content to allow his extraordinary work to sit unappreciated among his files; unless, perhaps, he had become absorbed in new research that overshadowed his accomplishment. After all, Oswald, Ruby and the Cuban assassins were all dead, and Martinez languished in a Cuban jail. Smailes speculated that perhaps only one goal could make such an achievement seem insignificant—the solution of a similar crime, whose perpetrators were still at large. He resolved to look into Bowles' Cambridge research as soon as he was able, despite the blandishments of George Dearnley.

The small, weasel-faced young man climbed into the passenger seat of the Volga sedan without a word. As the car sped away he stared gloomily out at the passers-by on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It was October, and some Muscovites had already begun wearing topcoats and their distinctive fur hats. Orlovsky maneuvered the car into the center lane, reserved for the vehicles of the
vlasti
, the bosses, and gathered speed. His broad Kazakh face contrasted sharply with the angular features of his passenger.

“I could be shot for this,” the man muttered.

“Come, come, Mischa. You always exaggerate. You must not forget where your friends are. You will come to no harm.”

Mikhail Pavelovich Popov needed no reminder of his uncle's status and influence. Or his wife's uncle, he should say. He had secured Mischa the position in the chairman's secretariat, and the apartment out by the airport. They had leaped over at least a five year wait.

“Petra tells me you have news, finally.”

“Something, I think,” he said, in the same sepulchral tone. He had not minded passing on the odd pieces of gossip, confirming and denying rumors. As long as concrete information were not involved, he felt as if he were merely indulging Moscow's favorite pastime. If his uncle, the big man out at Yasyenevo, were the beneficiary, so what? But now he had glimpsed a memo, overheard a remark, which confirmed for him a code name. He felt like a spy.

“Well?”

“Veleshin and the chairman were together yesterday, and they had been discussing a briefing at the Englishman's apartment.”

“Yes?”

“I heard the name Painter, that's all. I saw a memo last week with Veleshin's name on it, and thought I saw the same name. That's all, Andrei Petrovich.”